IBM Tone Analyzer - Like HAL 9000

In creating the Watson Tone Analyzer Service, IBM has been following in the fictional footsteps of Arthur C.Clarke's HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Consider the following "customer dialogue":

Dave Bowman: "Hal, switch to manual hibernation control."

HAL: "I can tell from your voice harmonics, Dave, that you're badly upset. Why don't you take a stress pill and get some rest?"

Dave Bowman: "Hal, I am in command of this ship. I order you to release the manual hibernation control."

HAL: "I'm sorry, Dave, but in accordance with special subroutine C1435-dash-4, quote, When the crew are dead or incapacitated, the onboard computer must assume control, unquote. I must, therefore, overrule your authority, since you are not in any condition to exercise it intelligently."

Dave Bowman: "Hal," said Bowman, now speaking with an icy calm. "I am not incapacitated. Unless you obey my instructions, I shall be forced to disconnect you."

IBM has given us a number of useful tools to help understand customers.

The IBM Watson™ Tone Analyzer Service uses linguistic analysis to detect three types of tones from written text: emotions, social tendencies, and writing style. Emotions identified include things like anger, fear, joy, sadness, and disgust. Identified social tendencies include things from the Big Five personality traits used by some psychologists. These include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional range. Identified writing styles include confident, analytical, and tentative.

Input email and other written media into the Tone Analyzer service, and use the results to determine if your writing comes across with the emotional impact, social tone, and writing style that you want your intended audience to see...

The analysis performed by the Tone Analyzer service is different from sentiment and emotion analyses. Sentiment analysis can identify the positive and negative sentiments within a document or web page. The sentiments can include document-level sentiment, sentiment for a user-specified target, entity-level sentiment, and keyword-level sentiment. Emotion analysis can infer different categories of emotions such as joy, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear. The Tone Analyzer service computes emotional tones, in addition to social and writing style tones. Tone analysis is less about analyzing how someone else feels, and more about analyzing how you are coming across to others.